Season is proud to present Thin Places by Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi).

The exhibition comprises paintings and large-scale sculptures that are connected through an evolving narrative of dual consciousness. Archetypal entities from a range of cultural and spiritual contexts—including rosary beads, a silver spoon, koru, and whetū—have been brought together to be read in different ways. There is a sense of a treasure box, a gathering of keepsakes, a deck of tarot cards. The show creates a space for the exploration of futurisms and transcendence.

The title Thin Places reflects the ushering into my art practice of my Irish heritage and its my-thologies—particularly the idea of an invisible divider, a thin place that touches time on one side and eternity on the other. I have previously explored Māori conceptualisations of this through tactile veil works that reimagine te ārai as a fluid barrier between physical and spiritual realms. This show is my way of connecting multiple whakapapa lines through shared spiritual positions. I explore the unseen and unspoken dimensions such as time-travel and intergener-ational knowledge to examine how mythology-building can happen through material, as well as oral or written, transferral.★☆★In my teenage bedroom, at my great-grandfather Paul’s house in Liverpool, there was a small ‘memory box’, a repurposed rosary bead box containing broken treasures that had belonged to his wife, my Irish great-grandmother, Anne Murphy. Her life and subsequent death were wrapped in mystery. There was a knowledge withholding—or ‘kaiponu’, to use a Whanganui expression—around her story. The only clues I had of the woman whose ‘eyes were my eyes’ were fragments of shiny adornments and waxy pictures of unnamed yet familiar figures. I would frequently review the bitsy, sacred mess, wondering if the items were indeed precious to Anne or made precious through her absence from them.